The story of how Boing Boing launched, built a profitable business, and still run it on their own terms. From Rob Walker’s profile in FastCompany:

“Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Frauenfelder and his partners didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff and a hotshot CEO, or otherwise attempt to leverage themselves into a ‘real’ media company. They didn’t even rent an office. They continued to treat their site as a side project, even as it became a business with revenue comfortably in the seven figures. Basically, they declined to professionalize. You could say they refused to grow up.”

Beginning today luxury clothes retailer HauteLook will invite shoppers to online flash sales by way of notifications in Facebook’s newsfeed.

Until now, according to the NY Times, “Flash-sale Web sites that try to recreate the rush of a designer sample sale have largely relied on alerting their members to upcoming deals via e-mail notifications.” But with hundred of millions of us spending so much time in Facebook, it’s time to fish where the fish are, says HauteLook CEO Adam Bernhard:

“Our members spend one-third of their online time on Facebook. So we know that getting out of the e-mail inbox is going to be crucial for the flash-sale business. This is designed to go where the shoppers are instead of where they come to shop.”

I figured it was bad form to leave up, in the top position on my site, a story that tells people to smoke Camels. So here’s something a little more wholesome from lollypop-maker Chupa Chups. These packages, designed to look a bit like cigarette packs, play off their “Stop Smoking. Start Sucking” tagline.

Their latest print campaign, for Mini Chupa Chups, is also clever — enlisting petite celebs such as Barbie to help get the size-specific point across.

In this vintage Camel ad from a 1936 issue of Life Magazine, Camel recommends a cigarette between each course of your Thanksgiving meal.

“The time-honoured turkey of our forefathers — done to a crisp and golden brown — and flanked by a mountain of ruby cranberry jelly. By all means enjoy a second helping. But before you do — smoke another Camel. Camels ease tension. Speed up the flow of digestive fluids. Increase alkalinity. Help your digestion to run smoothly.”

The specially-packaged Post-Its, which were handed out at a web design conference in Stockholm, included this caption: “Vintage Twitter. An original that sticks! They are twittastic! We have twittered for 30 years, but in our own way.”

“Amidst all this, Post-It celebrates 30 years in the business. What initially was considered a failed adhesive turned into maybe the most famous little piece of paper in history. Post-It became the standard for small, short messages and was used both between people and in public spaces, for anyone to see. Vintage Twitter is a loving homage to Twitter, with a reminder that the short message is not a new invention.”

Yeah, but that loving homage strikes me as a celebration of Post-It’s declining relevance. The campaign has me thinking actively about Twitter and its competitors, wondering which will replace Post-Its first. Is that what Post-It wants me thinking about?

Here’s what Google is doing with its $100 million acquisition of Like.com: Combining visual search with retail advertising opportunities. From NY Times:

“In a deliberate collision between nerds and fashion mavens, Google has created a new e-commerce site that significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online…. It is a collection of hundreds of virtual boutiques merchandised — or, in the new parlance, ‘curated’ — by designers, retailers, bloggers, celebrities and regular folks. You can shop in the style of, say, the actress Carey Mulligan or Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen — among the celebrities who signed up for the launch — or you can build your own boutique and amass followers who can comment on your taste.”

It’s interesting to see Google playing in the human-curated arena, eh? The celeb fashion mavens who are running the first few boutiques aren’t the kind of people who would accept financial deals that only pay them a share of retail revenues they help peddle. Perhaps, though, this celebrity-driven approach is one intended to seed the idea. Eventually, I suppose, individual aspiring fashionistas will pick up the slack set up their own boutiques — and they’ll do it for fun plus a simple rev share.

I’m also not sure what to make of Google launching it’s own content site. I’m guessing Boutiques.com is a test lab for something that Google will eventually syndicate to its AdSense publisher network.

(Disclosure: Google Ventures is an investor in Pixazza, but Pixazza has no connection to Boutiques.com or Like.com.)

It’s an ad with a good cause: Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, like other participants in the Gap campaign, picked a charity to which Gap will make 6-figure contributions — plus an extra buck for every time someone Likes the campaign’s videos in Facebook. From Mashable:

“Crowley and Selvadurai chose to benefit Camp Interactive, which combines nature and technology to benefit inner-city youth…. For each ‘Like’ one of the videos receives on Facebook, $1 will be donated to the charity featured in the video, on top of a base $150,000 donation from Gap. (Customers will also receive a 30% discount on one regularly priced item from Gap.)”

I wonder if it bums out Crowley and Selvadurai that their charity work with Gap promotes usage of Facebook, maker of Foursquare’s biggest competiton, Spaces.